Everything I Need to Know I Learned from RENT
by BeagleDee
Summary: Brought to you by crazybeagle and deeplyshallow. A comprehensive list of the most valuable life lessons we've ever learned, brought to us by the bohemians and all their vast wisdom and experience. Shameless parody.


_**Everything I Need to Know I Learned from RENT**_

**By BeagleDee**

**AKA the illustrious deeplyshallow and crazybeagle.**

1. The most morally upstanding people in this world are sassy drag queens who murder puppies.

2. Don't worry about AIDS. You'll live if you have a hot boyfriend who sings you a song on your deathbed.

3. You're a completely insensitive jerk if you don't want anything to do with a stripper who is trying to seduce you.

4. So your girlfriend commits suicide and you are going to die. STOP MOPING. What gives you the right to do that?

5. Someone's completely unrecognizable when they're not wearing handcuffs.

6. The most effective form of protest is making farmyard noises.

7. Landlords are jerks if they ask for the rent.

8. If you don't have a proper job, it's completely unreasonable to be poor.

9. If the girl you marry happens to be wealthy, you're a backstabber and a traitor.

10. It's socially acceptable to dance around on top of tables and sing loudly about weird and creepy sex at restaurants.

11. If you want to make friends with your ex-girlfriend's new lesbian lover, all you have to do is tango with her.

12. Opening up a restaurant in Santa Fe is an easy and obvious way to solve all troubles.

13. …Because tumbleweeds and prairie dogs are awesome.

14. A song about how you want to write a great song before you die will inevitably end up being better than the great song you actually do end up writing.

15. A happy ending is when a load of people with a death sentence haven't died yet.

16. It's perfectly normal behavior for a gay couple to skip around and sing in perfect harmony about how madly in love they are with one another and then proceed to make out when they've only known each other for about half an hour.

17. It's perfectly acceptable to scream WINE AND BEER repeatedly at your waiter when he takes your drink order. Even if you're underage, like Mimi.

18. If you're a lonely broke Latino stripper heroin addict with AIDS, your life doesn't totally suck. In fact, it'll all be totally awesome and enviable and glamorous as long as you can find yourself a lonely broke depressed unemployed moody ex heroin addict musician with a dead girlfriend and AIDS.

19. Having AIDS is a great way to bond.

20. Having AIDS means you'll have season after season of love.

21. If your gay lover dies, don't bring him to a Christian undertaker, because he will cruelly turn you away and call you a queer.

22. If you're a filmmaker with a fairly lucrative job with a tabloid news station, it's okay for you to only own one outfit, even when your unemployed friends do in fact change their clothes every now and then.

23. If you're dumped by your sexy boyfriend, you will become really depressed and homeless and then nearly die.

24. Living in America at the end of the millennium sucked.

25. When you're a bohemian, you're far too poor to buy a lighter.

26. Despite this, it's a great idea to use all your matches up on a stripper who keeps blowing her candle out as soon as you light it.

27. Talking about your dead girlfriend is a great way to get girls.

28. It is perfectly normal to sing, with perfect vocal acoustics, about how you can't set mike equipment up.

29. Lines from Hey Diddle Diddle, random anecdotes about cows called Elsie, and Diet Coke are actually deep and meaningful metaphors about being forced to pay rent and the exploitation of the homeless.

30. It's the right thing to do to hack into your school's computer system to spread messages about AIDS.

31. If a guy is vehemently pushing you away when you try and seduce him, he secretly wants you and he's just depressed – don't stop bugging him until he confesses his feelings. In fact, get his friends to do it too!

32. If you own a Range Rover, that automatically makes you a douchebag.

33. Parents are lame. You should never pick up the phone when they call to wish you well, particularly on Christmas Eve.

34. Jews celebrate Christmas.

35. If you're a lesbian, you typically wear Doc Martens and no bra.

36. …Or a cat woman costume.

37. …Or you wield a cowbell.

38. Knowing Musetta's Waltz and incorporating it into your "one song glory" doesn't make you effeminate. It just makes you angsty, artistic, and sexy.

39. If your girlfriend's just been resurrected from the dead by the power of your sweet, emo music, the first thing you ought to do is grab her and kiss her enthusiastically. You should ignore the fact that, being temporarily homeless, she hasn't brushed her teeth in weeks. You should also ignore the fact that she was probably dying of an illness that you, as an AIDS patient, don't want to catch yourself.

40. Drag queens can send you back to Earth from heaven.

41. At group therapy sessions, it's perfectly normal to express your feelings in song.

42. …And then to have everyone else join in with perfect harmony, because obviously they know all the words.

43. If your neighbor's dog is annoying you enough, you will have absolutely no reservations about letting a strange drag queen into your house to attempt to murder it...

44. …And then help you "trim" your Christmas tree.

45. …Or something like that.

46. Screw rulers. Measure in love.

47. ...And cups of coffee.

48. The perfect Christmas feast- Bustelo, Marlboro, bananas by the bunch, a box of Captain Crunch, and Stoli.

49. Oh, and don't forget the miso soup, seaweed salad, soy burgers, tofu dogs, and pasta with meatless balls. Yum.

50. If it's in your lesbian lover's nature to cheat on you for multiple other women, you ought to take her for what she is and who she was meant to be, or else you're just a jealous, anal-retentive control freak.

51. Impromptu salons involving Native American tribal chants being sung backwards through a vocoder and accompanied by badly played electric cellos are cool.

52. In New York City, hobos sing and dance.

53. And they all have really fabulous makeup.

54. If your lesbian lover's hanging out with a rich, sexy Calvin Klein model named Jill the second you turn your back on her, you two are still "okay."

55. The proper response to a stripper burning you with hot candle wax is a smile.

56. It's acceptable to be fashionably late to a party that's also a crime.

57. Being homeless is a great way to start off your new year provided you have a sexy new stripper girlfriend with AIDS or unemployed bipolar boyfriend with AIDS to hang out with.

58. The prospect of squatting in your own apartment doesn't suck. It's fun!

59. Stealing from ATM machines so you never have to get a job is justified as long as your hacker code commemorates the name of a dead transvestite.

60. Don't be afraid of KERCHING-KERCHING.

61. You're what you own.

62. The Wicked Witch of the West is secretly Mark Cohen's mother.

63. Without your significant other, you will DIE.

**Coming soon..._.Everything I need to Know I Learned from Wicked_!**


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